Does Scientology influence UPS?
Parcel service denies accusations from consumer protection agency
Berlin, Germany
November 10, 2000
ZDF
http://www.zdf.msnbc.de/In the opinion of consumer protection advocates, the Scientology organization is increasing its influence upon business. As an example, the Stuttgart consumer protection organization "Aktion Bildungsinformation" (ABI) gave the US company United Parcel Service (UPS) on Friday.
ABI Chairman Eberhard Kleinmann accused the parcel service of suspicious connections to Scientology as well as in regard to payments of monies and to management methods. In its response, UPS Deutschland Inc & Co OHG (Heuss) repudiated the charges: it was said that UPS did not approve of or promote Scientology, its philosophy, its theological or ideological goals in any way. It was said a temporary restraining order was in affect against those accusations by the ABI.
INCREASING CONTACT WITH SCIENTOLOGY
In Germany, according to ABI, almost 700 companies in possession of Scientologists. Almost all major corporations have already had contact with Scientology in the management area through cover organizations, said Kleinmann. As a charitable consumer protection establishment in questions of training, ABI has been fighting Scientology influence in business for years and says it has consulted with institutions, private persons and corporations, such as Daimler-Chrysler, for example.
According to ABI findings, the Scientology-aligned World Literacy Crusade Foundation (WLC) and US congressional representatives which accuse Germany of discrimination against religious minorities have received considerable finances from UPS. Besides that, it said, Scientology and its sub-organizations have closed delivery contracts with UPS. In addition, UPS was said to use management methods which resemble techniques of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
FINANCIAL AID FOR SUSPICIOUS ORGANIZATION
According to UPS's presentation on Friday, in 1996 a private business foundation contributed a sum of 35,000 dollars as one-time financial assistance to an organization whose activities included the training of at-risk youth. According to today's findings, this organization was connected to Scientology, which UPS would not have known at the time. It was said that UPS had never tried to influence decisions or measures by the US House of Representatives to the good of Scientology, said a UPS spokesman.
by Karl-Heinz Weigel, MZ
Berlin/Stuttgart. A Stuttgart consumer protection organization, "Aktion Bildungsinformation (ABI)", which observes sects and the psycho-market in Germany, made a connection between the controversial Scientology organization and United Parcel Service (UPS) at a press conference in the Berlin Hotel Esplanade. It was said in a statement from ABI chief Eberhard Kleinmann that, thanks to documents it had at its disposal, "conspicuous similarities" could be deduced between UPS management techniques and Scientology founder Ron Hubbard's totalitarian management technology. The documents reported, among other things, on chicanery and illicit work hours. UPS spokesman Hans-Peter Teufers (Cologne), when asked about it by the MZ [this newspaper], dismissed the accusations as "stupid stuff." He said a connection definitely did not exist. He said UPS would file suit for a cease-and-desist order.
Sero on silken threads
Berlin, Germany
April 21, 1999
TAZ, Marcus FrankenCreditors and owners disagree on disposal concept. Survival of the waste management company remains in question.
by Marcus Franken
Berlin (taz) - the future of Sero Waste Management Inc. remains uncertain. Creditor banks and owners could not agree on a common disposal concept for the troubled waste management enterprise at a meeting last week. "The sword of Damocles of long-term debt once again hangs over Sero," summarized Sero board chairman Hans Peter Doehmen.
The Berlin Sero company was once a favored, ecologically oriented stock investment. As the only recycling and waste disposal company quoted on the stock market, Sero glittered with ecological promises and steadily rising sales at which some experts in the otherwise conservative waste management field could only marvel. As late as the end of last year the enterprise had announced high dividends. At the same time, rumors of profit-taking, exaggerated ecological promises and proximity of the owners and managers with Scientology were making their way about.
Then Sero's bubbles started bursting. Last December the state attorney charged owners and managers with fraud. They had determined that the high sales existed on paper between Sero and other branches of the mother company, Euro Waste Service AG (EWS), a holding company with its seat in Duelmen. The businesses had inflated sales by exchanging bills without performing the services involved. This trick aided in raising the stock prices and the credit amounts at banks.
The question is why the banks which brought Sero to the market in April 1997 did not notice the deceit. Neither is the public auditor who would have had to review the annual reports of companies listed on the stock market a happy character. "The public auditor did not live up to certain professional standards," said the new Sero chief, Hans Peter Doehmen, sarcastically. "They did not review as thoroughly as was needed. The story is not yet over." He continued, apologetically, "The old business managers exercised a high degree of criminal energy and kept a low profile."
That will hardly console the ecological investors. Since the announcement of the fraud, Sero has fallen from 30 Euro-dollars down to 6.35 Euros on the market as of yesterday afternoon. The Eco-funds administrators also have to ask themselves why they were not more critical-minded with Sero.
The reorganization of Sero has introduced severe measures to cut back operations. The deceptive former owners have given their share of the business to a trustee, and will not take part in the reorganization. The unprofitable recyling of electronic parts will be suspended; four Sero establishments in western Germany and one in Eisenhuettenstadt will be closed. Of the 711 Sero staff, 259 will have to go; they have a welfare plan set up for them. The 30 branches of Sero will be consolidated into 15. The investors, which include Deutsche and Dresden banks, will forgo collecting debts in the about of 23 million marks. With these modifications, the business managers hope to place the "new" Sero on a solid foundation by the middle of this year, said Doehmen. Doehmen hopes to see things back in the black by the 1999/2000 business year.
There is still the risk of being forced into bankruptcy, since the mother company of EWS has accumulated debts in the amount of about 900 million marks. The banks are said to be prepared to take over the company for the time being and improve the capital outlay of Sero with new money. This way the banks could not only recoup a portion of their loans, but also win back some of the trust of the small investors.
The Dresden Bank had helped to bring Sero onto the market, and had recommended the stock to its customers. At today's price, the investors have lost more than half of the buying price of 15. "Banks are not immune from intentional, well-executed deceptive maneuvers to which criminal efforts have been applied," stated Claudia M. Bregen of the Dresden Bank about the failure.
The stockholders would prefer, however, that a larger company take over EWS and Sero on a long-term basis. That decision is not supposed to happen until the end of April. If the banks and stockholders are not able to agree, that could be the end of Sero.
Nazis are pop
Pop Heil!
Ten German Years
Berlin, Germany
(approx) March 10, 1999
http://www.zitty.de/99/17/nazipop2.htm
[Inhalt 17/99]While the leftwing loses its social and cultural superiority, the Nazis aim for the leading edge of youth culture.
by Marius Babias
Flower children. The gray capitol city turns into a sunflower plantation during the Love Parade. The flower children are both avant garde and mass culture rolled up into one. If it were not for the beat that marked their Ant Trail, they would ramble about without orientation. The Queen Ant - Westbam, Rainald Goetz or Dr. Motte - fly in advance with the eternal lure of youth culture: music. Boom-boom-boom: Anti-depression sounds with the side-effect of a mass attack of optimism.
Berlin 1992: Skinheads at home
It was a long road from Woodstock to the Love Parade. Woodstock was regarded as the beginning of the end of the revolutionary youth. Since flower children who were oriented to experience and success did not want to have anything to do with politics, it was all the more easy for the flexible Nazis to invade the vacuum, conquer pop culture and shift everyday life to the right. This procedure, which was accelerated by the "reunification" is as old as revolutionary youth culture itself, which joined the victory march in the USA and around the world. Although many Nazis who have now infiltrated this pop culture do not recognize his name, the apocalyptic horseman of this development is called Charles Manson. 30 years ago he already had an inkling of what was to come: the apocalypse of youth culture.
Massacre in Bel Aire
It began with a massacre. On August 9, 1969 five people, Sharon Tate Polanski among them, were butchered in fashionable Bel Aire. Shooting them to death was not enough, the dead also exhibited stab wounds. The house door was smeared with blood graffiti "PIG." The killers stabbed Tate, seven months pregnant, multiple times in the underbelly.
This and other murders committed according to the same model, for which they were convicted and are still behind bars to this day, went to the account of Charles Manson and his group, "The Family." The motive for the bloodbath in Bel Aire is still unexplained today - it presumably was revenge, because the house which Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski were renting belonged to a music producer who had rejected Manson.
Manson, who wanted to be a Rock Star and who saw prophesies of the coming Apocalypse in several songs of the "White Album" by the Beatles ("Helter Skelter," "Piggies," "Sexy Sadie" and "Revolution"), had trained his commune, "The Family," on the remote Spahn Movie Ranch. The group melded together Scientology practices, LSD and group sex into a conspiratorial community and a terroristic cell.
Since the middle 1960s, members of Charles Manson's Family have maintained connections to parts of the counter-culture, musicians in particular. The Manson Family had lived for a while with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who recorded Manson's song "Cease to Exist" under the title "Never let Your Love Die." The connection between politics and youth culture was typical for the time, yet one saw a strategic perspective with the background of the Vietnam War to battle U.S. imperialism in the heart of the USA. The American SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), who at one time had 200,000 members, regarded the young white people as a new revolutionary class for whom, as quasi-proletariat, nothing was outside their capability. Former SDS Chairman Mike Klonsky, in his manifest "Towards a Revolutionary Youth Movement," was one of the first to make a connection between the class struggle, anti-imperialism and youth culture.
Music (Woodstock), student protests ("Day of Rage" in Chicago) and consumption of drugs were among the practices of a counter-culture which intermingled with the politics of the revolutionary SDS. In the center of the SDS argumentation stood the Black Panthers, who were to have received unlimited support in their battle against suppression by the whites. Manson, who in reality was a racist, recognized the strategic value of this consolidation: the blacks were to be supported only until they took care of the dirty work in overthrowing society; after they were liberated from one of the sick elements, then the white race, baptized in blood, would assume power, with Manson at the lead.
Charles Manson – Cult figure for leftwing and rightwing
As many others, Manson embodied a ruthless extremism which combined revolutionary politics and counter-culture, and he exercised a large force of attraction upon leftwing and rightwing radicals. The leftwing radical Weather Underground and later the rightwing radical White Aryan Resistance admired him. Weather activist Bernadine Dohrn said, "Stabbing these rich pigs with their own knives and forks and then eating in the same room, that is totally far-out. The Weathermen are fans of Charles Manson." Tom Metzger of the rightwing radical White Aryan Resistance formulated it in more general terms, "We began to think a little more circumspectly and got interested in a few positions of the left. We have assumed a series of positions from the leftwing, and we have begun to recruit people from the leftwing."
The readiness of the rightwing radicals to learn from the leftwing radicals has also been shown in a real life German example. Red Army Faction (RAF) co-founder Horst Mahler, who has since propagated the nationalist issue, authored a treatise in 1970 - "about the armed struggle in western Europe" - to which the rightwing radicals today explicitly refer.
In his essay, "Heil Hitler! Have a Nice Day," U.S. American author John Miller painstakingly worked out how Manson turned into a cult figure - for leftwing and rightwing. And Manson, according to Miller, personified the Underground shift from the left to the right. This shift is to be understood not in that the right has taken over the left's political program, rather their role as political avant garde. They possess formerly leftwing discourses and redefine them. This strategy of the rightwing cultural hegemony is being implemented with a multitude of political forms of action - up to and including terrorist attacks, as that on the Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, in which 168 people were killed and 500 wounded.
Strategic Alliance between Students, Revolutionaries and Pop
While the Manson Apocalypse is not conceivable in the German context of the relatively upright student protests of '68, two other specific factors come into play in the USA: the Blacks' efforts at emancipation, as well as a traditionally excessive ideology of civil rights, which includes rights like bearing arms, refusal to pay taxes and religious freedom. But one basic parallel between the USA and the BRD [Germany] is of decisive strategic value: the alliance between students, revolutionaries and pop[ular music], which dominated the cultural spheres of the BRD up until the Eighties.
This leftwing cultural hegemony was gradually suppressed, and finally inclined toward the rightwing. Before the "re-unification," it was of particular dispute to historians whose, Hitler's or Stalin's, crimes introduced the compromise of Ausschwitz, afterwards a series of discussions strengthened this turn-around. Whether Botho Straus or Martin Walser,, whether at an impasse or at Kosovo - social discourse today is oriented to the right. The Green Party, which arose from the anti-nuclear and civil rights movement, and which has finally been allowed into government, has no other choice but to adapt its positions to suit the right if it wants to remain in power.
In that way the CDU/CSU petition campaign against the governing coalition's impasse was able to force changes. The reform of the state's citizen law was catered according to the wishes of the opposition. The CDU/CSU's use of the long abused means of agitation in the pedestrian zones showed their determination to take over the battle strategy of the leftwing, which had specialized in political agitation since '68. Now the right has recognized the strategic value of such publicly effective means - and is using it against the Left. CDU-Schaeuble is risking a new petition campaign against the government's retirement reform.
A primary recent example of the erosion of leftist fundamentals is the Kosovo War. The emotional force of the pictures of the refugees drove a wedge through pacifism. Atrocity propaganda demolished the platform of the war opponents. The "just war" against the Serbs enjoyed great acceptance even in the Left. In view of the pictures of poverty from Skopie and Blace, the Serbs' being regarded as the "natural" enemies of the Germans since the time of Bismarck was put in the background.
Also in this case, the discourse managed to be tipped away from the geo-political interests of NATO in the direction of genocide. What the Kosovo War, proclaimed to be a battle for human rights, actually accomplished - outside of the successful demolition of the Yugoslavian state - was now brutally visible: relocation and murder of the weakest of the weak, the gypsies.
RAF [Red Army Faction] - Heroic hand-to-hand combatants
The avant garde culture of youth appears today in the radical right. In eastern Germany, rightwing hypotheses dominate the schools and city councils, and skinheads and Punks beat people of other skin colors to death. Charles Manson demonstrated how leftist battle strategies could be charged with racist views. Without mentioning him personally, the rightwing militants in the USA have adapted his guerilla tactics and the schizoid ideology of racism. Radical leftist groups like the RAF had a great attractive pull on parts of the youth culture back in the Seventies and Eighties.
The radicalization, which arose from restrictive BRD relations, set free a heroic element, the hand-to-hand combatant who removed himself gradually from the mass movements and wound up politically isolated. Not suited to carry out political goals, the hand-to-hand combatant was, nevertheless, suited for use as a projection screen for rebellious youth. The form, however, alienated itself more and more from content, but it appeared useful to break up the state's monopoly on violence through individual acts of violence. The armed battle in the cities established a form - the punctual use of violence of a high symbolic force - which, after the "re-unification," was the tool of choice by radical rightwing youth. In these circles, Kay Kiesner, who murdered a policeman and crippled a PDS book seller by shooting him, is honored as a mini-Manson.
While "National Liberated Zones" are springing up instead of blossoming landscapes in Brandenburg, the students today - traditional reservoir of the leftwing - are taking care of the state of emergency in education. Their protests, during the university strikes of 1997, for instance, consisted of wanting to join the FDP. And nationwide, the discussion in filled assemblies center around the issue of whether the Soli document was worded a bit too radically, because of which many refused to sign it.
Love Parade: The new Woodstock
Unlike the hope-filled years of the late '60s, there is a huge gape between leftwing politics and counter-culture today. The strategic goal of a combination of politics, youth culture and daily life was left back someplace on the snowboarder ramp, and has veered right, like at the Wave & Gothic Festival which has been invaded by the skinheads in Leipzig. And the mainstream reacts with alluring sounds a la Rammstein. The new Woodstock is the Love Parade, in which march increasing numbers of skinhead groups.
The masses of youth themselves are celebrating a new social Darwinism directed by Marke Schroeder/Blair. From the Utopia of the collectives came the ideology of the individual bodies. Drugs, yes, but only for a rave increase of performance. Improvement of individual life circumstances instead of altering the social conditions responsible for them - that is the creed of youth in 2000.
The two students who ran amok in Littleton are not the monster kids which have been characterized by the media, but deviant images of a rightwing underground. Grown up in a social and cultural environment which has been redefined since the time of Reagan, they mutated into one-on-one combatants of darkness. Such outbreaks of violence, which are also connected to the casual U.S. weapons legislation (which is, in turn, an expression of rightwing politics), perpetuates the powerfully symbolic formula of the hand-to-hand combatant, like the attacks on foreigners in the Berlin subway.
What to do? Winning back the discourse is the most urgent mission of the scattered left, who have made themselves comfortable in their pop reservations. But how? Dr. Motte knows the answer, "Music is the key." The key is still there, but somebody changed the lock.
Current update
Antifa Soli Concert
"Beats against fascism"
on August 29, 1999 at the airport square in Strausberg. The concert is organized by the Berlin Anti-facist Operation and "Fritz." Information about the concert can be found at: www.antifa.de
More than tolerant?
Invitation to the 1st CONFERENCE OF THE YOUTH ALLIANCE'S "OPERATIONS EMERGENCY ENTRANCE" in Frankfurt/Oder on August 28, 1999
From: "Berliner Morgenpost"
April 28, 1998The strong reactions to the book "Helnwein and Scientology" have, a half year after its appearance, died down. Despite that, the legal consequences continue on.
At first the painter, Gottfried Helnwein, tried to have the book enjoined, but could not get the agreement of the Berlin State Court ("Landgericht").
In his book, the author, Peter Reichelt, shows in detail the relationship of the painter, Gottfried Helnwein, to Scientology. For many years Helnwein has disputed that he was a Scientologist. His words, "I shit on Scientology." He reacted with a temporary enjoinment, the calling in of declarations of omission, and complaints against numerous media publications.
The reports about his membership in the sect (it has been under observation by the Office of Constitutional Protection because of constitutionally inimicable tendencies) have had a negative effect, over the years, on the image of the painter. As a result of that, Helnwein has been forcing the comparison of the situation of the Scientologists in Germany to the persecution of the Jews in the Nazi era. According to a judgment by the Frankfurt Superior State Court ("Oberlandesgericht") of 1996, Helnwein may even be described as a "minister of Scientology." The painter, in turn, calls the judge a "Nazi judge" and disputed the decision that same year in the constitutional court. The Federal Constitutional Court has not yet reached a decision. On his side, the Frankfurt judge has charged Helnwein with personal offense. The investigations are still in process.
Niko